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Programming Language Gurus Converge on 'Curry On' Conference (curry-on.org) 88

Posted by EditorDavid from the assembly dept.
Videos are now online from this week's Curry On conference, which incuded talks by programming pioneers Larry Wall and Matthias Felleisen, as well as speakers from Google, Twitter, Facebook, Microsoft, and Oracle. Dave Herman from Mozilla Research also talked about building an open source research lab, while Larry Wall's keynote was titled "It's the End of the World as We Know It, and I Feel Fine."

Billing itself as a non-profit conference about programming languages and emerging computer-industry challenges, this year's installment included talks about Java, Rust, Scala, Perl, Racket, Clojure, Rascal, Go and Oden. Held in a different European city each year, the annual conference hopes to provoke an open conversation between academia and the larger technology industry.
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Programming Language Gurus Converge on 'Curry On' Conference More

Programming Language Gurus Converge on 'Curry On' Conference

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  • But a lot of projects that primarily feed egos and serve to prevent people from getting generally useful skills (so they cannot easily change jobs).

    • Now you made me wonder...which ones are those two? :) (I admit that I'm personally increasingly leaning towards general language implementation ideas and perhaps metalanguages that can be easily ported on top of different platforms so that one didn't have to get skills that are less-than-generally useful and could still easily change jobs while retaining the ability to create useful structures in languages that generally don't include them - without having to switch your entire platform, which is often not

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by gweihir ( 88907 )

        If you need to ask, then you cannot understand the answer. Or maybe you are just trolling?

        • Why would I have to be trolling if I'm asking which two of "Java, Rust, Scala, Perl, Racket, Clojure, Rascal, Go and Oden" you as an individual consider relevant? Two different people can look at the same thing from two different angles. That's why multiple-criteria decision analysis has arisen as a discipline in the first place.

          • Give it up, man. He's basically bitter that the world is largely moving on from C. He seems to be on every language thread telling everyone how superior he is for using older, less powerful tools.

            • Re: (Score:2)

              by gweihir ( 88907 )

              Hehehehe, funny. Have looked at the TIOBE index lately? It may not be very accurate, but nothing in the TIOBE top-5 is going away anytime soon, let along the long-term 2nd place.

              • The world is moving away. It's slow, and not going to move completely away for a loooong time, but C used to be the #1 king of the hill. It's now relegated to niches, albeit large ones. You can almost certainly avoid learning anything new until you retire, but nonetheless that does not make you superior for only using C.

                • Last time I checked, most embedded development is done using C especially on low power devices. We are getting more of these devices added to our world every day, not less. The PC on the other hand is in decline in terms of numbers. I don't think the world is moving away from C, but I do think that C is in decline on the PC.

                  Not much competes with C in the embedded space. While Java is having some limited success on the bigger embedded systems; Those that have enough space to install it and still have room l

                  • Last time I checked, most embedded development is done using C especially on low power devices.

                    A mix. Some is done in C. In part that's due to a lack of a good C++ compiler. AVRs and Arms support C++. My shitey little 8051 only supports C (lol IAR making class a synonym for struct does not a C++ compiler make), so I write in C.

                    However, many of the shitey 8051s are being superceded by ARMs. I'd love to switch, but we're about to enter production so it's not worth it now. The next version will use the ARM. I

    • This is research. Relevance to fashion is not important. All of the "relevant" languages got their start from people researching and using a wide variety of programming languages.

    • The main replies to this story seem to be basically hatin' on people who want to do something interesting with their spare time. How horrifying that people want to do something new and better rather than stick to whatever was state-of-the-art in the 1970s.

  • niche and egghead languages aren't how the world at large does things. Of those languages in summary, Java is used. Perl used to be but Larry has been doing wonderful job of letting it die and few would choose that for new infrastructure. the rest are fads

    • niche and egghead languages aren't how the world at large does things.

      The fallacy of appealing ad populum applies to programming languages as well. Not to mention the fact that lots of people who are not doing things "how the world at large does [it]" are not exactly going to be talking about it a lot if they find themselves in a competitive environment. Why give your competition ideas? I mean, the probability of your competition "getting it" is often very low but still non-zero.

      • no new language is going to give competitive features to a product. Mature libraries, analysis and debugging tools and standard approaches to common problems instead should be primary concerns of a new business or new product idea.

        • Re:how about conference with relevant languages (Score:4, Insightful)

          by K. S. Kyosuke ( 729550 ) on Sunday July 24, 2016 @05:48PM (#52571951)

          The same reasoning in civil engineering would translate to saying that you only need a shovel and a mason's trowel to build anything. Yes, you can, the "competitive features" like improved insulation or just fashionable architecture don't depend on how you put the parts in place. But more powerful tools allow you to do more things in limited time.

          Having said that, building those tools is complicated enough so it takes too much time and isn't generally done, be it building languages, debuggers, or whatever tool you need, basically equally. You do correctly, if obliquely refer to a well-identified problem [unibe.ch] of insufficient tooling even in those languages that are generally considered sufficiently expressive to not require additional syntax or semantics. Interestingly, this is independent of whether you're working in a more specialized language that has the concepts in question embedded in its core primitives, or in a less specialized language that requires you to first build these higher concepts (of interest to you) out of its lower-level constructs. It would even appear that the problem is roughly of the same scope regardless of whether you're building a new language (in the traditional "lexical-syntactic" sense, not just in terms of new APIs) or not, with the "standard approach" you're mentioning involving using non-specific analysis and debugging tools that are all-too-often only of marginal benefit because they don't provide the views that a large system might require to be more easily comprehended or modified, for example, by a newcomer. Building improved tools unfortunately requires some kind of model regardless of whether the model is explicit in form of another language or merely implicit in the code of the tools and the patterns of use of some API you're building. But the designers of programming environments can't possibly anticipate all the domains you might want to use their environment for, so even if you decide not to use or develop another language for an application, unfortunately, not much changes, there are still tooling problems to be solved. You've merely shifted the burden from one kind of tools to another kind of tools, and one could successfully argue that accessible techniques for building better tools (to bring them into the realm of what Eric Raymond refers to as "casual programming" in TAoUP) are highly desirable for overall productivity.

          • Wow. That was so nonsensical. Complete gibberish. The point is mature libraries and tools are more important than ego-driven language masturbation.
            • What a way to completely miss the point. You're not even disagreeing with me!

          • You think you're an expert on logical fallacies, which you aren't. But you just hit the excluded middle bang dead centre.

          • No, the same reasoning in civil engineering would be Caterpillar holding a seminar bulldozing the caterpillar way

      • It's not a fallacy, it's true. How many lines of Rust are in use compared to C or even COBOL?

    • More useful than current (Score:5, Insightful)

      by SuperKendall ( 25149 ) on Sunday July 24, 2016 @04:38PM (#52571733)

      Going to a technical conference for a language that is popular or that you know well does not offer that much value, because almost anything you learn there could have been learned online quicker.

      Going to a conference filled with niche languages or higher level ideas is great because it's much more mind-expanding, and even if ideas seem esoteric there's always some interesting twist you can take back into languages you know better or are more practical to work with. It also helps keep you from getting too pigeon-holed by ignoring changes in the world around you, as I see many object-oriented die-hards doing...

      • but languages are just rehashes of the same ideas, so no mind expansion to be had there. there is nothing done in new languages that can't be done in others

        • there is nothing done in new languages that can't be done in others

          Then why aren't we programming everything in assembly? (But I agree that the greatest value today may not lie in the development of new completely general languages but perhaps in finding ways to formulate ideas in specific application domains more concisely while keeping readability so that you could achieve more complex but beneficial things using less brain time, including doing the same (in a circular fashion) to the development of such languages in order to simplify this process it actually made sense

          • > Then why aren't we programming everything in assembly?

            Half joking, Half serious: Who says we're not?

            Aside, because a developer's time costs more then the CPU's time -- THAT is why we use higher level languages. It comes down to price. We trade quality for iteration time. Most businesses can't _afford_ to justify writing in assembly. It is far cheaper to just hire a few recent college grads and have them bang out code in the latest iHipster language. High Level language are good enough.

            /sarcasm Who

        • there is nothing done in new languages that can't be done in others

          Not only that, it can be done with worst-case constant overhead simply by implementing the new language using an old language first.

          See, I know my algorithmic complexity theory too.

        • but languages are just rehashes of the same ideas

          So... which existing language is Rust's memory model a rehash of?

          there is nothing done in new languages that can't be done in others

          That's only true in the fully qualified version:

          there is nothing done in new languages that can't be done in others given unlimited time to implement.

          Once you admit that limited resources exist, then yes, there's plenty we can do in new languages that we can't do in old one.

          • So... which existing language is Rust's memory model a rehash of?

            I can't answer in depth since I haven't looked at Rust's memory model in depth yet but the things I've seen so far sort of reminded me of linear type systems and their ilk, so I wouldn't be surprised if there was very few new ideas in it, if any.

            • I meant ownership model as AC pointed out.

              I can't answer in depth since I haven't looked at Rust's memory model in depth yet but the things I've seen so far sort of reminded me of linear type systems and their ilk, so I wouldn't be surprised if there was very few new ideas in it, if any.

              Yeah, that's the right direction. But nothing new is rather unfair. There's a difference between type theory and a practical, fast language with those types in it.

      • It's about latency. If you're in the same room with someone and any communication takes seconds and you can pick someone's brain with regards to things you're interested in, and perhaps get some new ideas and immediately check whether someone else has already tried them, that could save a lot of time for some ideas to be incubated that might take otherwise more time "brain-offline" to develop. Yes, learning things that have already matured can often be done more easily online at your own pace. That's probab

    • The world won't get much done if there aren't eggheads discovering new ways to do things. You do realize Slashdot is news for nerds, right? So arguments about "not cool enough for me" don't hold a lot of weight.

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by radish ( 98371 )

      Well I guess different people have different opinions about what is "relevant" and a "fad".

      I haven't seen any Perl in production use in a number of years - although I'm sure it exists, for me and my career it's way past being "relevant". I was using it 20 years ago...

      Scala is highly relevant, it's a fantastic language which I've been using professionally for over 2 years to great effect. I've built infrastructures serving millions of requests per second using it - and I'm not alone - Scala is widely used at

    • niche and egghead languages aren't how the world at large does things.

      Wow you actually have just dropped down as far as using anti intellectual insults. This is supposed to be news for nerds, you know. Since when did anti intellectualism become a nerd thing?

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by epine ( 68316 )

      niche and egghead languages aren't how the world at large does things. Of those languages in summary, Java is used. Perl used to be but Larry has been doing wonderful job of letting it die and few would choose that for new infrastructure. the rest are fads

      No, no, and no.

      Computer science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes.
      — Edsger W. Dijkstra

      I've never 100% agreed with this quote. A big chunk of computer science is about building better telescope

      • Nope, most languages are just rehashes of same old ideas. java is warmed over C++ and gives NOTHING more, for example.

        JavaSCRIPT on the other hand is a step backwards giving somewhat less power.

        In fact let's just skip the other languages and say the "improvements" to the most languages are just additions that make them slightly more approach the power LISP had decades ago.

  • A Type is Worth a Thousand Tests (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    This looks like worth a watch... https://youtu.be/q1Yi-WM7XqQ?t=6m20s (actual content starts 6:22 into the video).

  • Curry on? Was the name chosen because it's mainly for H-1Bs?

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